(A little earlier than usual this year cos I ain’t planning on doing nothing else before 2024.)
On 6 November, I arose well before dawn to catch the first of the four trains necessary to ensure I would be at Fulham Palace before 10am, as the call-sheet demanded, for makeup. Once the top of my head was dusted down to reduce the glare of reflected light, I had a quick catch up over coffee with the producer, and then commenced the interview.
It turns out there are boisterous school trips to the palace, which is on a Heathrow flight path, and while the Bishop’s library makes for a great setting, the Diocese has never sprung for soundproofing. There were other issues.
The perfectly charming and lovely producer/interviewer was still early in the process of figuring out the content and shape of this four-hour/four-episode documentary series on sf (for SkyArts, to be broadcast early next summer). So he was not entirely sure what he wanted, and the questions he asked didn’t really match up with our preparatory discussions. Nor could he actually formulate questions, leaving me to figure out which bits of his of beatings around the bush I could respond to. But I’m a trouper, used to thinking on my feet. During the interview, I helped him evolve several plans to ensure he had at least some of the material he needed. But he couldn’t stick to a plan: let slip anything even mildly unanticipated and he was off like a greyhound who’s sighted the hare.
All of the notes I’d jotted in advance stayed in my bag, useless. And my answers got longer and longer, careering wildly between generalisations and specificities. I forgot names and titles, got details wrong, launched into examples that partway through I realised wouldn’t work, backtracked, foraged, scavenged and dredged as beneath the hot lights I became increasingly panicked and delirious.
For five hours.
(With a short break for lunch).
Afterwards, as I walked to the tube, I realised I could recall nothing at all of what I’d said, only the things I’d meant to say but knew I hadn’t.
On the trains home, I couldn’t concentrate to read. But when my mind tried to go back over what happened to flagellate itself, there was nothing: just hysterical blankness. Exhaustion.
The whole year’s been a bit like that.
A long slog, often at fever pitch but never with any sense of consummation: work; industrial action that petered out despite obvious and egregious institutional/sectoral dishonesty, recklessness, incompetence, unconcern and contempt; and editing, so much fucking editing.
By late spring/early summer, Steve and I put This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook to bed (due out 6 February 2024), and right at the end of November, Andrew, Sherryl and I finally delivered the manuscript for The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (due out 13 June 2024).
Various contingencies, mutual agreement and a certain amount of falling on my sword/control-freakery, meant I was the main editor for the former, and line-edited all 55 chapters of the latter (from roughly 320,000 words down to 275,000). They are two very different books, described here and here.
Both fell foul of Covid and its long ongoing tail, and of the ever-increasing workloads and ever-deteriorating working conditions of academics everywhere, including the editors.
I actually enjoy editing. Partly it’s a way to carve out time to keep on top of the field, including finding new voices and perspectives, partly it’s the problem solving: how to wrestle pieces down to word-length, while clarifying meaning and without sacrificing content. Such focused work is probably the only area of my professional life where I feel any sense of control.
But it is massively time-consuming labour (and completely unvalued by HE institutions and systems). Also, I’m tired of participating in my own exploitation, and enabling the exploitation of others, by commercial academic publishers. The ones I’ve worked with have treated me well enough, apart from the fact that their immensely profitable existence depends on not paying authors and editors for their actual labour. Hence, these two books may very well be the last things I edit.
In just a few days’ time, I stand down as a co-editor of the Studies in Global Science Fiction series, which I’ve been involved in since the original 2015 pitch, leaving it in the-hands-far-more-capable-than-mine of Anindita Bannerjee and Rachel Heywood.
I am also in the process of standing down as a co-convenor of the BAFTSS SFF SIG (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Science Fiction and Fantasy Special Interest Group), which will take a few more months as Craig and Stacey and I ease our replacements into place.
And I’ve already stood down as Film Studies Programme Leader after my latest seven-year stint (I’ve been PL or acting PL for more than half of my 21 UWE years, which are like dog years but in reverse).
Hopefully, this will all free up some time for doing nothing.
Fat chance.
In 2024, there will be builders (and Routledge proofs) during my busiest stretch of teaching and marking.
For stupid self-inflicted reasons I have to read 200 climate change short stories before May (i.e., during my busiest stretch of teaching and marking).
I really need to do the formal proposal for the sequel to The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture.
And I’m still toying with the idea of a short book (30,000 words-ish) on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but I need to find a publisher who will trust me to write it in a couple of months in the early- and mid-summer, and who I trust to publish it before the end of the 50th anniversary year.
And I need a proper holiday of some sort.
Sure, we had a ten-day trip to Amsterdam (and to Utrecht to hang out with Marta and with dreamboat Dan), but I went down with a week’s worth of norovirus on day two, and we also had to survive the worst summer storm and hottest day Amsterdam has experienced since records began.
And I did manage to visit a friend in Cornwall just before term started up again. It was only three days but it was the first break since Xmas 2021 where I’ve not gone sick with something.
Unless I get my act together in the next three days and make some actual fucking headway on this piece on contemporary dystopian film, the only thing I’ve managed to write this year is:
‘Horror and Class’ for Roger Luckhurst, Stacey Abbott et al., eds, The Routledge Companion to Global Horror (forthcoming)
But I did see a handful of things published, the first two written during 2020’s lockdown:
‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Suburban SF’, Science Fiction Film and Television 16.3 (2023): 251–275
‘Cli-Fi’ in J.P. Telotte, ed., The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas (Oxford UP 2023), 52–70
‘Post Production: Screening Futures – From Scarlet to Ebon’ in Joel Hawkes, Alexander Christie and Tom Nienhuis, eds, American Science Fiction Television and Space: Productions and (Re)configurations (1987-2021) (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), 263–276 (my first ever postscript to someone else’s book)
‘Transitional Demands: John Rieder, Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present’, Science Fiction Studies 150 (2003), 271–75
‘Joshua Schuster and Derek Woods, Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk’, American Literary History Review 35.2 (2023), 1107–1110.
‘When the Cup of Endurance Runs Over’, Verso Blog (21 April 2023)
I was also the subject of a really long interview
‘Criticism and Not: An Interview with Mark Bould by Marta Olivi’. lay0ut 1 (2023); an English-language transcript of the original rambling interview here.
I delivered two invited research presentations:
‘Strategic Realism, Techno-Utopianism and Environmental Apocalypticism: Key Tendencies in Cli-Fi/Sci-Fi Cinema’, Cardiff Environmental Cultures, Cardiff University, 1 November 2023
‘Three Tendencies in Sci-Fi/Cli-Fi Cinema’, St Andrew’s University, 13 March 2023
and one conference paper:
‘Marjorie Prime: labour and technology, memory and loss in the Anthropocene’, BAFTSS 11th Annual Conference, University of Lincoln, 3–5 April 2023
I also banged on and on (and on) about Free Guy as a podcast guest:
Fantasy/Animation, Episode 124: Free Guy podcast (July 2023)
And I found a new niche for myself in Bristol film exhibition ecology as the bloke you bring in when you want your audience to be reminded how shit, fucked up and weird the 1980s were, introducing:
Albert Pyun’s Cyborg for Bristol Bad Film Club, Bristol Improv Theatre, 16 February 2023
John Badham’s WarGames for Horror Without End/20th Century Flicks at Bristol Aquarium IMAX, 24 September 2023 (in a double bill with Threads called ‘ThreadGames’)
Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours for Forbidden Worlds/20th Century Flicks at Bristol Aquarium IMAX, 22 October 2023 (the second half of this was a bit harder to pull off as I am no fan of Scorsese – but I did trick a mostly baffled and increasingly angry audience into a massive round of applause for Teri Garr)
This is the first year since 2006 that I have not examined at least one PhD.
Mark Bould 